dicing up some grubs for old-fashioned diagnostic virology

At what resolution in cryo-EM do you see clear holes in aromatics? I see in some X-ray crystallography literature people are saying 1.6Å, but in cryo they seem quite visible at lower resolutions than this.

life achievement: replaced my chainsaw chain for the first time

She couldn't resist the opportunity to explicitly say she's punishing Harvard for hiring former elected or appointed Democrats. This level of explicitly partisan score-settling is wrong and un-American.

I know I haven't been active on here much lately but...I am hiring a core facility postdoc to own the Krios, do a lot of cryoET jobs.rutgers.edu/postings/249...

I was thinking to myself "what were the best years so far for USA? maybe 1998 and 2014?" This leads to my new hypothesis (nonserious) that the best years are going to be an inflection point in the median income (PPP-adjusted) with positive first derivative.

Trafficking studies that rely on following virus microinjected into the cytoplasm aren't valid if the virus in native cells would be inside a membranous organelle.

Since I got a third cryo-transmission electron microscope, I have more 'scope time than I know what to do with. If you have a project that requires a large amount of data collection, get in contact because we can probably work something out.

Don't be a useful idiot puppet for the regime drugmonkey.wordpress.com/2025/02/25/d...

Wondering if your study section cancelled? I update this sheet daily. As of today, 56/124 study sections that should have met since Jan 2, 2025 have "not met as scheduled." docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Does anybody else find it weird that it's common for receptor homologs to bind different viral species of the same family but in a completely different pose? I would've thought a priori that if receptor use is conserved, the pose will also be conserved,

Next Thursday I am teaching in the morning, flying to Wyoming, dinner with the faculty, meetings/seminar all day, flying back on the red-eye. Feels like what my schedule used to be like pre-pandemic

This is great visual of what IDC is used for from the Council of Governmental Relations (COGR).

Academics with tenure: we aren’t supposed to cower and grovel for money like people do in other jobs. The whole point of tenure is to be liberated and courageous.

Thrilled to see the approval of a Nav1.8 inhibitor for pain. Has anyone tested whether the analgesic effects of suzetrigine and opiates are additive, synergistic, or antagonistic?

Tests: not enough tests & not fast enough thanks to CDC. New tests might not be authorized by FDA. CDC not tracking data or sharing it. CMS again not covering testing costs. No tests, no detection, no ability to contain the outbreak.

a health official being quoted in the newspaper saying TB "is a respiratory virus" does not fill me with confidence that the outbreak will be managed competently

Complying in advance doesn't protect you, it just gets you on historical record as a quisling: The NIH Edition drugmonkey.scientopia.org/2025/01/21/c...

David & I preparing for electron microscopy class on the JEM-2010F

We are hosting a cryo-EM grid nanofabrication workshop on 28 April 2025, as part of the Canadian Cryo-EM Nexus (ccemn.ca). Learn how to make holey gold or holey carbon grids in your own laboratory! Space is limited, so please apply at web.cvent.com/event/ee88ac...

US government is botching bird flu in the exact same ways the botched COVID. Completely avoidable disaster that the Biden administration sleepwalked straight through.

well, OK then, if you say so...

Every time my lab visits the Stanford Linear Accelerator, there is some hardware catastrophe or power outage or something. I think we bring all our bad luck to California. Better that than keeping it at home, though

Cleaning out old files and wanted to post this because I got nostalgic: me in grad school with my dear colleague Joanita Jakana in front of the JEM-3200FSC. A good teacher and friend.

It was revealed during the trial that FHP had agreements with pathologists, where some % of tests with abnormal but inconclusive results would be reported as normal, preventing tests and costs. These agreements were once in writing, but for obvious reasons, became verbal. But the practice continued.

𝗞𝗲𝘆 𝗙𝗶𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀 This study reveals that enterovirus-containing #endosomes can deform and rupture, enabling the release of genome-containing particles into the cytoplasm. 3/9

I'm going to run an intensive "boot camp" called "Practical Cryo-EM" where we learn how to freeze grids, align microscopes, collect images, and do 3D reconstruction and stuff. January 13-17

One like = one piece of lore If we hit triple digits I will probably switch to virus lore but this seems as good a way as any to introduce myself to the new skeeters

I spend a lot of time in public libraries

the school sent photographers for an upcoming press release and they took a picture of what looks like me petting the Krios

I expected I would spend most of my bench time as PI showing people techniques I know and they don't, but I actually spend most of my bench time showing people techniques that neither of us know. Is "ability to sorta figure things out from the manual + literature + internet" a teachable skill?

we're so fucked we're so fucked we're so fucked

Hi there. We're Retraction Watch -- retractionwatch.com -- and we've joined Bluesky.

Identifying a new viral pathogen the old-fashioned new-fashioned way: by imaging it directly with cro-electron microscopy, at high enough resolution that you can pick out what variety of virus it is:

serifs are lindy

Good morning

The posting is officially up jobs.rutgers.edu/postings/234... I figure if you're on Bluesky you probably have no trouble finding work but honestly it is an extremely compelling project that I'd love to chat about with you

Interested in seeing exactly what happens when a virus enters the nucleus? I'm looking for a postdoc (or possibly grad student) to advance our in situ cryo-ET studies of virus infection. Please contact me directly if interested.

United States HHS should create a program to provide a demand floor for vaccines (Lyme, dengue, chikungunya, HPAI, EEEV) where the presence of an available vaccine presents a major public health value in excess of what companies can recoup in direct sales.

So uhh... we REALLY need dengue vaccines. There are some in the pipeline but for now we have nothing once the current doses of Dengvaxia expire and that's not great since Puerto Rico declared an emergency over the virus.

According to the model, routine vaccination would avert more illness, but would also cost more. However, viewed from the societal perspective, annual vaccination would be cost-saving.

ERs aren’t busy because of low acuity patients who “don’t need to be there”* ERs are busy because ER patients being admitted to the hospital are waiting for upstairs beds *tons of stuff on this here mdaware.blogspot.com/2017/11/unne...

Grant proposals would be more legible if you spread the same content out over more pages with airier formatting, but if you increase the page limit, people will just cram in more content. My solution: instead of a page limit, we will now have a maximum Shannon entropy permitted for each proposal

I switched to EndNote from Mendeley because Elsevier killed Mendeley Desktop and....it's just such a bad piece of software. There are much better ways to do all these things.

Can you cite a provisional patent on an NIH Biosketch?

might not come back after the week tho

no offense to Cell Press but I should get +5MB filesize limit for every panel I add in response to reviewers

everyone who does more grantsmanship than me is a sycophantic rent-seeker and anyone who does less grantsmanship than me is a naïve dilettante

I have never been as concerned about biocontainment as when my postdoc brought live cockroaches into the lab